It seems the only reason why Stephen King is invited on television anymore is so he can attack President Trump. On The Late Show Tuesday evening, host Stephen Colbert chatted with the prolific horror novelist about the coronavirus and the liberal pair fretted we were living in one of King’s dystopian novels with the villain Trump telling Americans to “drink bleach.”
Colbert immediately urged King to trash the president as the main character in our current “horror story.” King happily obliged, comparing Trump to a villain politician in one of his books, who offers bizarre solutions to problems like shooting trash into space. The author compared this to Trump telling people to “drink bleach” to defeat coronavirus, (something that never happened):
STEPHEN COLBERT: Well, what do you make about the current horror story that we're in and one of the central characters, which is our-- our president?
STEPHEN KING: Well, you know, the-- the thing about drinking bleach just kind of bowled me over. People have been telling me for years, you know, that I sort of foresaw Donald Trump. I wrote a book called "The Dead Zone," and there was a character in there, a kind of TV comedian-type guy who appealed to the common people and told everybody that he was going to solve the pollution problem, and the problem of garbage. He was going to shoot it all into outer space! And then he would hand out hot dogs and he'd say, "You're going to say 'hot dog' when you elect Greg Stillson president." And really, shooting garbage into outer space compares pretty favorably to injecting bleach into the human body I think.
As if the media wasn’t already guilty of stoking panic with their doomsday reporting on this virus, Colbert asked King to predict how this pandemic would play out if he had written it in a book. King acknowledged he already had, in his book The Stand where 99% of the earth’s population dies:
Well, I wrote a book called The Stand, in 1975 or '76, and I'm still apologizing for it 40, 50 years later. People will come along and say through their little masks, "I feel like I'm living in a Stephen King story." And my response is, "I'm sorry for that." But when I wrote it back in the 70s, I just had this idea based on a chemical spill in Utah. And I went to a doctor that I knew, and I said, "Could you give me a scenario for a pandemic that wipes out 99% of the Earth's population?" ... And my fear, Stephen, about the coronavirus, is that we may get things back to normal, and then want virus mutates, and it comes back, which leaves two possibilities-- one is that it comes back much weaker and it's not much of a problem. But the nightmare scenario-- which of course is where my mind goes-- I'm sorry, but it does-- is that it comes back more lethal than ever.
Read a partial transcript below:
The Late Show
5/5/2020
STEPHEN COLBERT: Well, what do you make about the current horror story that we're in and one of the central characters, which is our-- our president?
STEPHEN KING: Well, you know, the-- the thing about drinking bleach just kind of bowled me over. People have been telling me for years, you know, that I sort of foresaw Donald Trump. I wrote a book called The Dead Zone, and there was a character in there, a kind of TV comedian-type guy who appealed to the common people and told everybody that he was going to solve the pollution problem, and the problem of garbage. He was going to shoot it all into outer space! And then he would hand out hot dogs and he'd say, "You're going to say 'hot dog' when you elect Greg Stillson president." And really, shooting garbage into outer space compares pretty favorably to injecting bleach into the human body I think.
COLBERT: Yeah, yeah, I think it's on-- I think it's on par. If you had written-- if you had written the scenario we're in right now, would it have gone this way? Is it playing out the way you would have imagined it?
KING: Well, I wrote a book called The Stand, in 1975 or '76, and I'm still apologizing for it 40, 50 years later. People will come along and say through their little masks, "I feel like I'm living in a Stephen King story." And my response is, "I'm sorry for that." But when I wrote it back in the 70s, I just had this idea based on a chemical spill in Utah. And I went to a doctor that I knew, and I said, "Could you give me a scenario for a pandemic that wipes out 99% of the Earth's population?" And his eyes lit up. I mean, they love that sort the apocalyptic "What if" scenario. And he said, "Well, the flu would be the best thing. It's a virus. It's not dead. It's not alive. Nobody really knows what it is." But the thing about the flu is it's the gift that keeps on giving because every year it comes back, but it comes back in a different form, so that you need a different shot for it. And my fear, Stephen, about the coronavirus, is that we may get things back to normal, and then want virus mutates, and it comes back, which leaves two possibilities-- one is that it comes back much weaker and it's not much of a problem. But the nightmare scenario-- which of course is where my mind goes-- I'm sorry, but it does-- is that it comes back more lethal than ever.
